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Adams assured his brother that the situation in England was worse than he could imagine; even “our own friends fail to support us.” Lincoln’s rejection of General Frémont and his emancipation proclamation had played into the Confederates’ hands; without the slavery issue, the North was simply a large country fighting a rebellion in its nether regions. “Look at the Southerners here,” Henry wrote indignantly on October 25; “every man is inspired by the idea of independence and liberty while we are in a false position.”32 The Times seemed to take a malicious pleasure in repeating as often as it could the hoary claim that the war was a contest between one side fighting for “empire” and the other “for independence.”33 The only politician who was prepared to attack Delane’s crafty misrepresentation of the conflict was the Duke of Argyll, who delivered a ringing defense of the Union at his annual estate dinner on November 2. “I do not care whether we look at it from the Northern or from the Southern point of view,” the Illustrated London News reported him as saying. “Gentlemen, I think we ought to admit, in fairness to the Americans, that there are some things worth fighting for, and that national existence is one of these.”34

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The public in both countries would have been shocked had they known Seward’s real thoughts about the state of Anglo-American relations. Although the secretary of state was always talking as though he were locked in a life-and-death struggle with Britain, he knew that there was no desire in London for conflict with the North. Even if he discounted Lyons’s protestations and Adams’s dispatches, John Motley, whose opinion Seward trusted, had been giving him verbatim reports of his conversations with persons of note in England, including Lord Russell, Prince Albert, and the Queen. Motley’s letters contained “a most cheering account of the real sentiment of honest sympathy existing in the best Class of English Society towards us,” exclaimed the president’s private secretary John Hay, who was present when Seward read out sections to Lincoln.35

The truth was that Seward cared little for what foreign governments thought about the war so long as they obeyed his directive to regard it as a minor insurrection and not a fully fledged rebellion. He worried even less about foreign sentiment and persistently ignored the warnings from his consuls and Henry Sanford that the North was squandering its goodwill abroad.36 “Foreign sympathy … never did and never can create or maintain any state,” Seward wrote flippantly to John Bigelow, the new American consul in Paris.37 But once he learned that the new Confederate commissioners were to be Senators Mason and Slidell, Seward started to feel anxious about the North’s representation in Europe. John Bright’s complaint about the Morrill Tariff having “done immense harm to the friendly feeling which ought to exist here towards you,” and Motley’s observation of the “very great change in English public sympathy since the passing of the Morrill Tariff,” suddenly became the talk of the State Department.38

William Howard Russell had disregarded rumors that Seward was looking for emissaries to send to Europe until he bumped into him on November 4 and learned that the stories were true. “He begged of me to come and dine with him tomorrow,” Russell recorded in his diary, “to meet Mr. Everett who is here as one of a secret commission.”39 But having embraced the need for special agents abroad, Seward discovered that it was no easy task to find the right men. The august Edward Everett, a former secretary of state, minister to Britain, governor of and senator for Massachusetts, and the greatest orator of his generation, changed his mind two days later, and several other candidates showed a similar reluctance. Finally Seward was able to enlist four suitable representatives: General Winfield Scott, who had been forced to retire from the army; John Hughes, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, who would battle with Slidell for the sympathy of the French; the Episcopal bishop of Ohio, Charles